LINQ to SAP SuccessFactors Data

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the SAP SuccessFactors via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for SAP SuccessFactors. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData SAP SuccessFactors Data Source".

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   You can authenticate to SAP Success Factors using Basic authentication or OAuth with SAML assertion.

   Basic Authentication

   You must provide values for the following properties to successfully authenticate to SAP Success Factors. Note that the provider will reuse the session opened by SAP Success Factors using cookies. Which means that your credentials will be used only on the first request to open the session. After that, cookies returned from SAP Success Factors will be used for authentication.

   • Url: set this to the URL of the server hosting Success Factors. Some of the servers are listed in the SAP support documentation (external link).
   • User: set this to the username of your account.
   • Password: set this to the password of your account.
   • CompanyId: set this to the unique identifier of your company.

   OAuth Authentication

   You must provide values for the following properties, which will be used to get the access token.

   • Url: set this to the URL of the server hosting Success Factors. Some of the servers are listed in the SAP support documentation (external link).
   • User: set this to the username of your account.
   • CompanyId: set this to the unique identifier of your company.
   • OAuthClientId: set this to the API Key that was generated in API Center.
   • OAuthClientSecret: the X.509 private key used to sign SAML assertion. The private key can be found in the certificate you downloaded in Registering your OAuth Client Application.
   • InitiateOAuth: set this to GETANDREFRESH.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   User=username;Password=password;CompanyId=CompanyId;Url=https://api4.successfactors.com;

👁 Required connection properties for the data source. (QuickBooks is shown.)

5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting SAPSuccessFactorsEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

SAPSuccessFactorsEntities context = new SAPSuccessFactorsEntities();

var extaddressinfoQuery = from extaddressinfo in context.ExtAddressInfo
 select extaddressinfo;

foreach (var result in extaddressinfoQuery) {
 Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.address1);
}

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.